How I Lost My Voice and Found My Strength

Anyone who has ever received a medical diagnosis of “idiopathic” anything knows that treatment will be darts in the dark and that the prognosis is unknowable. Idiopathic roughly translates to “we have no idea” and that was all I had to go on during my first yearlong vocal cord paralysis. Tubes went up my nose and down my throat. Sensors stimulated and probed my voice box. My cords weren’t dead. Just dormant. They stood opposed, pretending not to know each other. They were fully in tact, but they refused to play nicely and close the gap that’s needed to make the air that passes by vibrate and produce sound. This was 25 years ago in the days before smartphones and laptops, so for the better part of a year I wrote notes on little pieces of paper and sulked.

Sulking was not a new sport for me. I was a sulky kid and a sulky teen, but I was a noisy sulker. Everyone knew when I was upset. I cried loudly, slammed doors, and made my displeasure abundantly clear. My volume countered a prevailing sense of myself as being too small to matter. I had, after all, worn size 6 clothing until I was 12. And though not freakishly small, friends have looked at my feet and asked how I walk on those tiny things. As the youngest of three children in a boisterous (loud) argumentative (Jewish) family, I sometimes made myself invisible so that my sisters would weather the parental storms. At times I actually felt invisible -- a handy skill growing up in New York where I could weave down a crowded Manhattan sidewalk without slowing my pace. Or get from the buffet table to the bathroom at a packed party without disturbing a single conversation. In those days, my voice was frequently in my head, loud and strong, and also at my disposal, powerful and clear, when I chose.

Now voiceless at 32, I simply moved through my days bewildered, sad, and isolated, unable to communicate the increasing and desperate loneliness I felt despite the love and patience of a fiance, step-son, and extended family. But I moved to the sidelines of family gatherings, resuming my childhood observer stance, out of the line of fire but acutely aware of everything I wanted to say but couldn’t. I declined party invitations, stopped going to dinner at restaurants with friends, and made my world small and quiet enough to allow my occasional whispers to be heard. I grieved who I had been. 

With my nebulous idiopathic prognosis, I didn’t know whether to accept and adjust to this new condition or entertain a nostalgic yearning that I might return to my full vocal capacity. Was silence my future, or would my voice heal? Would I ever sound like myself again? They had no idea. Before the paralysis, I was a choral singer. With a good warmup I had a two-octave range and got huge joy from singing with the San Francisco Symphony Chorus. At work and in relationships I had a lot to say and delivered it with little censorship. My stridence was sometimes a liability in my professional life, but other people weren’t saying what needed to be said, and I had possessed hubris in bulk. Now, not so much. What a ripoff! My hubris had finally modulated into deserved confidence and I was the only one who could know it.

I went to voice therapy which was intended to teach me how to use specific muscles to produce as much sound as possible. Like tuning in to the elusive musculature of the pelvic floor while attempting a Kegel, getting muscles in my throat that had never been asked to do anything except follow along with the others, was baffling. I can wiggle my ears (and scalp, although not on purpose) and I can raise my left eyebrow without the right one moving a hair. But getting my omohyoid superior belly muscle (which is nowhere near the belly) to move my hyoid bone was downright impossible. And exhausting. With so much air going in and out unfettered by my petulant vocal cords, I was out of breath any time I tried to speak. And using muscles that were never intended to be called into service for the job they were being recruited for created a fatigue that felt like my throat was always at the end of a 6-mile sprint. By the time I was beginning to activate my omohyoid, my vocal cords had begun to return to somewhat normal functioning.  

For a couple of years I continued to improve until I was at about 75% of my original tone and resonance, but low on endurance and volume. And then one morning during an especially frigid February, I felt a small tickle in my throat. There were three glorious days when my vocal cords swelled up and I sounded like Tallulah Bankhead (not as devastatingly witty) but within a week, I was silent again. This time it lasted six months and only returned to about 60% capacity. Both vocal cords have gone out three more times since that first bout in 1996, but happily for shorter and shorter stretches. It’s been about ten years since my last encounter with prolonged silence, but every time I get that feeling in my throat or someone sneezes on me, dread descends. 

One time I had a temporary treatment where they injected filler into one cord to plump it up. (They couldn’t do both cords because they tend to spasm and could get stuck in the closed position which would cause suffocation. So persnickety these vocal cords!) Besides that it was about seven trillion times more painful than promised, it felt a little like Flowers for Algernon, knowing I would eventually revert back to what had become my airy sound, unable to sing, and unable to yell for help. Note to self: don’t ski or ride a bike if you can’t make enough noise to holler at side-swipers. 

At times I’ve felt connected to the disabled community, and my laser focus would glare a hole into someone’s forehead when I saw insensitivity to someone with some sort of physical difference. More than once, I was asked by colleagues to “just speak a little louder” in meetings. My face would flush and the tears would zoom up to my eyeballs, and I would utter with humiliation and bitterness “this is all I’ve got.” Now it has become part of my shtick. When I speak to audiences, I always ask if the back row can hear me, and if the tech can’t be adjusted, I tell them to move forward because, well, this is all I’ve got. Now, it’s just who I am. One cord straining to reach its lazy partner. They still don’t play well together. These days I’m less Tallulah and more Jackie O.

By the time I was interviewing for a position at Stanford, I had learned that rather than wait for the umpteenth sympathetic “aww, not feeling well?” that it was better to just announce it up front. I cleverly worked my vocal cord challenges into my teaching demonstration as an illustration of how well I understood students who don’t always feel heard. I got the job. One of the first colleagues who befriended me, the director of Stanford’s Oral Communication Program had Emile Zola’s quote at her desk: If you ask me what I came into this life to do, I will tell you: I came to live out loud. I wondered how I would ever make a real mark if no one could hear me.

Years (and two more partial paralysis episodes that lasted a few months) later, as the director of Stanford’s learning strategy programs, I founded the Stanford Resilience Project. Though I had been resiliently managing my intermittent vocal weaknesses, it was not my own resilience that inspired me. What inspired me was the student I coached who had witnessed her family’s murder and survived the Rwandan genocide. It was the student who, while in middle school, had built a desk out of cardboard because as the motherless adopted nephew in a home with eight kids, that was all he could find. It was the students, miserable and worried, who came in for academic coaching after failing an exam to whom I could teach better ways of learning. It was the students who, in their disappointing grades or job rejections, I had the privilege of introducing the possibility of finding meaninging and learning from their pains. It would be years before my own resilience came into focus. 

The Stanford Resilience Project’s definition of resilience was “learning or finding meaning from failure” and most often, it was new skills or approaches to learning that my students were learning. Their failed exams, internship rejections, and romantic breakups became opportunities to reflect and find meaning, and make a connection with people who cared about them. More often than not, students would return weeks or months after a coaching session with fresh perspective and renewed optimism. Most important, they were more sure that future setbacks would surely happen and they would be prepared to deal with them. For some, the lessons or the meaning will take years to emerge. A student who has been rejected from every graduate school they applied to may not be able to make sense of it right now. A student who has lost a parent may not find any meaning in this tragedy for decades. A woman who loses her voice may not be able to find out what good it has done until she’s well into her 50s.

Before my idiopathic viral infection, I was a soprano and a powerful and vocal leader. I was also sometimes shrill and didn’t listen enough, and though my nasal Long Island sound (a few notes shy of Fran Drescher) could cut through the din of discussion, I recall that the quality of my voice, or maybe of the personality producing that voice, was harsh. 

Last month I gave a presentation to high school parents on how to help kids become resilient learners. Afterward one thanked me for my perspective and suggestions. In passing, she told me my voice was so soothing and calm, and seemed to embody everything I was presenting in the workshop. I had heard this from students many times -- how warm and welcoming my office was at Stanford and how my voice was so calming and reassuring it managed to bring their own anxiety level down several notches. Now I get it. This is why I lost my voice. I hadn’t just come back from paralysis to be able to speak again (albeit more softly). I lost my voice to learn that my softness needed a voice. I thought it had muted me but it turns out it has amplified the best of me.

Vocal cord paralysis silenced me for many months and has permanently softened what I sound like. It also taught me that I really enjoy the silent and solo crafts of quilting and gardening, and that connecting with beauty and nature make me less lonely. It taught me that when surrounded by smart and engaged professionals who can be trusted to shepherd good ideas, usually everything does get said in a meeting, and not by me, and that my times of quiet are when other people gather clarity and find their own voices. I learned that I have a presence that is not made apparent by my voice but rather by who I am. I learned that I absolutely love to write, and given the time and inspiration to immerse myself in it, writing is one of my preferred modes of communication. Writing is what I imagine for myself in the nanosecond of descending dread that follows someone coughing in my vicinity.

Resilience is not just bouncing back to where we were before the setback. It’s about getting something of value from the things that deplete us. I know now that my years of silence transformed me into a better listener. That my soft voice is the embodiment of the loving and lovable person I really am. That a voice is not just a vehicle for words, it communicates the essence of who I am. My silence showed me my true self, that I don’t have to be loud to live out loud.